What is Metadata?

July 10, 2013 / Melody Smith / Comments Off on What is Metadata?

So much talk and news has been around metadata. It has practically become a four letter word. MIT’s Media Lab has developed a new tool – Immersion – to help individuals understand how much personal information their ‘metadata’ reveals about them. This interesting topic was found on The Independent in their article, “MIT’s ‘Immersion’ project reveals the power of metadata.”

Metadata means the information regarding the context of any particular communication. The metadata for a phone call would include the time of the call, its duration, and when it took place. The metadata of an email exchange would be similar, but not include the subject line or email content. So having just the date, time ,and recipient of emails is supposed to be less intrusive, just because you don’t have the actual body of the message? Some politicians apparently think that is the case.

What metadata really does, in this instance and more applicable situations within technology, is reveal relationships. Relationships between terms, between definitions, and yes, between people.

Melody K. Smith

Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.

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Melody Smith

Melody K. Smith has provided organizational, social media and digital communication services to a large non-profit for the past twenty years. Prior to that she championed employee engagement and communications in the healthcare field. She holds a Bachelors degree in Marketing. When not wrangling and writing TaxoDiary content for your reading pleasure, Melody writes fiction, rescues dogs and throws legendary dinner parties.